1. Introduction

During the last few months, several people have monitored various major mailing lists and have extracted questions that are important or commonly asked. This FYI RFC is one of two in a series of FYI's which present the questions and their answers. The first FYI, FYI 4, presented questions new Internet users commonly ask and their answers.

The goal of this FYI is to codify the Internet lore so that network operations staff, especially for networks just joining the Internet, will have an accurate and up to date set of references from which to work. Also, redundancies are moved away from the electronic mailing lists so that the lists' subscribers do not have to read the same queries and answers over and over again.

Although the questions and their responses are taken from various mailing lists, they are presented here loosely grouped by related topic for ease of reading. First the question is presented, then the answer (or answers) as it appeared on the mailing list.

Sometimes the answers are abridged for better use of space. If a question was not answered on the mailing list, the editors provide an answer. These answers are not distinguished from the answers found on the lists. Sometimes, in order to be as complete as possible, the editors provide additional information that was not present in the original answer. If so, that information falls under the heading "Additional Information".

The answers are as correct as the reviewers can make them. However, much of this information changes with time. As the FYI is updated, temporal errors will be corrected.

Many of the questions are in first person, and the answers were directed to the originator of the question. These phrasings have not been changed except where necessary for clarity. References to the correspondents' names have been removed.

The Q/A mailing lists are maintained by Gary Malkin at FTP.COM. They are used by a subgroup of the User Services Working Group to discuss the Q/A FYIs. They include:

   quail@ftp.com           This is a discussion mailing list.  Its
                           primary use is for pre-release review of
                           the Q/A FYIs.

   quail-request@ftp.com   This is how you join the quail mailing list.

   quail-box@ftp.com       This is where the questions and answers
                           will be forwarded-and-stored.  It is
                           not necessary to be on the quail mailing
                           list to forward to the quail-box.